Law Prof Blog Recommendations: Increasing the Estrogen

We here at Feminist Law Professors don’t care about “size.” There isn’t a publicly accessible Site Meter here because we do not run commercial advertisements, and we try to offer some small measure of privacy protection to our readers. Publicly accessible Site Meters collect and reveal the IP addresses and other identifying information about readers to the public, and also facilitate extensive reader tracking, see e.g. this, which doesn’t really fit the values of this blog.

Of Paul Caron’s Law Prof Blog Rankings, Brian Leiter has noted: “Of the top five, four have almost nothing to do with law, and four are right-wing or far right-wing in their political orientation.” They are also heavily male dominated (but see the Legal History Blog, The Conglomerate, the Family Law Prof Blog, and Althouse). You won’t find some very good law prof blogs with predominantly women authors listed by Caron’s methodology, so allow me to highlight them here, in no particular order:

I should add that, inspired by Ann’s thoughtful insights, I’ve upgraded and gone private with the site meter. I did not opt for the invisible site meter, because I think visitors and commentors should be aware of the tracking, but their information is no longer publicly available.

Over at ContractsProf Blog, I am not in a position to make this executive decision, but I also think it is less of an issue because, no matter how provocative our posts or failing our attempts at humor, we just don’t get a great deal of comments.

Here are two more:http://debwald.blogspot.com/
by University of San Francisco adjunct prof Debbie Wald, also a lawyer specializing in forming families using assisted reproduction, andhttp://julieshapiro.wordpress.com/
by Seattle University law prof Julie Shapiro who writes mostly about defining who a child’s parents are

Thanks for this post, and for the link to Dan Solove’s post about sitemeters and privacy. I have a sitemeter on the Legal History Blog so I can see where in the world readers are coming from. Since one of my goals is to promote the field on the web, I’ve thought that having the sitemeter public was useful. But the concerns you raise are important.

Blogs will make different choices about all of this, but there’s one point that I think is worth highlighting: you can have a public sitemeter **without** displaying an individual users’ full IP address. My sitemeter is free (I make no money on the blog and try to spend no money). The free version doesn’t display the full IP address. Here’s how Solove describes it:

“Regarding Site Meter, bloggers who use the premium Site Meter service (which we use) display full IP addresses in their public stats. Those who use the free version of Site Meter have the IP addresses partially blocked out in their public stats. Site Meter has an option to conceal all the stats, but it doesn’t allow for only concealing or partially blocking IP addresses. The choices are to publicly display everything or conceal nearly everything.”

Actually — the choices are to publically display everything, a middle-ground with no full IP addresses, and concealing nearly everything. Easier for me to choose the free sitemeter, since my blog has much less traffic than Solove’s. But still, it’s an option to consider. (I used to have a widget that gave me more data, but after reading this post, I’ve deleted it.)